


wonders never cease

by TheVoidWalkers



Series: The Void Walkers (official interludes) [3]
Category: The Void Walkers
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-05-06 19:09:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5427392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVoidWalkers/pseuds/TheVoidWalkers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Growing up is hard work, or: Miringnell through the years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wonders never cease

She was born more than a thousand miles away, in the half-light of swelteringly hot Akorrusian forests. She dreams it sometimes, sees herself in purples and blues, silk-draped and shaded by trees. Perhaps in another world that would have been her, but this is not that world, and in this one she is Luce. A Winaforian name for a Winaforian girl.

            She tries not to wonder what her Akorrusian name was, or would have been, and most of the time she even succeeds.

* * *

            Miringnell is small and cold and isolated, and it is home. Luce wakes from dreams of smothering southern heat and dresses quickly in the northern chill. Through the thin glass of her narrow window the sky is still dark. The drawers beneath her bed are crammed with furs, and most of what isn’t fur has it around the cuffs or hood instead. Even her boots are fur-rimmed.

            With only two drawers and a single shelf to store her belongings, Luce only has a few different outfits. She wears the two shirts that don’t have any fur until they’re thin enough to read through, at which point the priests seem to take notice and the fur quickly disappears from her meagre wardrobe. It’s not that the priests are neglectful, but – they aren’t parents. They are kind, and clever, and dedicated, but Miringnell is a small town and when Luce is brought to them they only house seven qualified priests to twenty-four children. This could be a fine split elsewhere, but the priests are priests first and everything else second, and all but one are in their early twenties. They aren’t parents, and they don’t know how to be.

            So Luce becomes independent very early, and she is fine with it. She is fed and housed and clothed and schooled, and that is enough. It is more than what some have.

            There’s a girl a few months younger than Luce who has the same eyes as one of the men who works on the grain fields outside the town wall. There’s a boy with the same hair as a woman who helps collect lumber. They meet on the street, sometimes, and their eyes slide carefully past one another. Luce has seen this, and she thinks of being fed and housed and clothed and schooled, and she sees the patched clothes, the pinched cheeks of the man and the woman.

            Miringnell is a small town, and there are twenty-four children in the tower.

            Luce sees many of those estranged parents, but she never finds a match the way that the other children do. She never sees her eyes, her nose, her hair echoed on another person. There is no one to ask what her name would have been, in another world where the tower wasn’t her home.

            The priests are not her parents, but they are enough. Breakfast is bread with butter or jam or even honey, and she eats crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with others, jostling for space on the tired old sofas of the tower’s second floor. Near everyone there wears some kind of fur, and no one matches her or even each other, but it is home.

            This isn’t the world of her dreams, where she eats fruit picked from vines and little forest birds caught with snares. This is the real world, and it is furs and bread and the red cloaks of the priests, and it is hers.

* * *

            There are many Akorrusian things that Luce wonders about. Her name is one of them. The other – is more complicated.

            Luce is a girl. By sixteen she knows it for sure, but there were a lot of years where she felt like she knew nothing at all. It doesn’t help that Winafore is a strange place to experience such feelings – a place where confusion is allowed, but only for a time. Initially it was easy. One of the other children showed Luce how to weave the braid in her hair, a neat one down the right side of the face with a metal hoop bound into the end. The braid tells others to hesitate before saying _he_ or _she_ , to stop and ask her first. It works, up until months stretch into years and people move from acceptance to frustration, like they thought her confusion was something she would and should grow out of. Frustration became annoyance and Luce at least knew she wasn’t a boy, so she took the braid out of her hair and that was it.

            Except it wasn’t. It was wobbly, and difficult, and sometimes she would sit in the dark in her room, winding and unwinding it, the metal hoop snug around her thumb. It was the most difficult thing in all the world, to figure out that she was a girl. She is eleven when she finally settles, but she won’t be comfortable with it until after her sixteenth birthday. 

            Maybe it would have been easier if she had parents, but Luce’s mother is an Akorrusian woman with a question mark for a face, her father even less known. The closest things she has to parents are the priests that choose to care for her in this tiny Winaforian town with its vast empty grasslands and bleak winter sky. Maybe things would have been easier for her in an Akorrusian life, but she still gets there, in the end. Just – slowly.

            It would have been even slower without the Rynns.

* * *

            They are four strong, a mother, a father, and siblings. There is a brother five years older than Luce and a sister six months younger, and if it wasn’t for the age different they could have been mistaken for twins. They have the same dark eyes, the same big nose, the same scruffy red hair, the same expressive hands.

            Rynn means _ink_ , in the tongue of Winafore’s dragons. The name comes from their parents, who run Miringnell’s only printing press. The press in combination with prominent freckles meant that once the nickname reared its head it would never go away. They are the Rynns, the ink twins, and they are Luce’s first and closest friends.

            She meets them in the dawn of wartime, two scared children standing in her room in the bluish dark of the northern morning. She’s half-awake for maybe a heartbeat and then she’s shooting to her feet because even here she knows them. Luce has spent her entire life either in the confines of the tower or the confines of the town wall, and it’s hard to miss the ink twins. She already knows their names but she asks for them anyway, and then the boy is gone and she is alone with the girl. With Ashé.

            Luce is six when they meet, and Ashé five, and there are still five long years to go before Luce will finally recognise who she is and ten before she will be happy with it, but something in her rings with the rightness of their meeting. The don’t say much, and even then what they talk about is pretty general, but something in Luce’s chest has swollen to the point of bursting, and talking is making her light-headed.

            The thing is, there’s a war coming. That’s what Ashé tells her. That’s what she figured out for herself when she peered in on the strange soldier talking to Head Priest Firin late last night. It should frighten Luce, and she supposes that it does, but at the same time she’s not sure what to feel. It seems alien to her that the grief of one woman justifies endangering the lives of thousands of people. It seems like such an abusive use of power that it almost doesn’t feel real, even with the obvious fear of the twins and their parents.

            Even when those parents, loving parents who can feed and shelter and clothe and school them, give their son to the priests. Lebo is one of them now, another child who finds the match for his own face wandering the streets instead of looking down on him as he falls asleep at night. But these parents have wealth, they live a comfortable life, and even as they give their son to an entirely different life than the one he had been growing into they don’t turn their backs on him.

            Some small part of Luce feels like this is cheating, like they are getting everything all at once. Parents and priests where everyone else has one or the other. It’s hard not to like the ink twins, though, and Luce started loving them long before she met them. Living with them made loving them even easier.

            Lebo is moved into Luce’s room that same day. He carries in two large boxes and Ashé staggers behind him half-hidden behind three. He’s only been wearing it for a couple of hours but already his new Initiate robe seems like a comfortable fit. Luce’s own robe lies at the bottom of one of her drawers, and she doesn’t wear it because she doesn’t want to become a priest – and couldn’t if she tried, she has no ability for spellwork – but something still stirs jealously in her chest.

            It sets a trend. Lebo was given to the priests to protect him from conscription, but he loves it and excels. His half of their tiny room quickly turns into a maze of books and notes, all of them meticulously organised. He loves the reading, the extra assignments after class, and his spellwork blossoms under the guidance of the priests. He’s never been null, not like Luce, but under proper tutelage his skill progresses in astonishing leaps.

            Living with Ashé is – different. She’s so different to Lebo, loud and messy and reliably awkward. She isn’t even supposed to be in the tower, but it takes Luce only a couple of days to realise that she isn’t going anywhere. She sleeps on the floor on a mattress of pillows and blankets, and Luce grows used to stepping over her in the mornings.

            On the third day, Luce goes to see Lauré Nilasémo. She finds her up in the open air of the ceremonial floor, her body and sword flowing through almost liquid motions. Lauré is a tall cord of a woman, with short peppered hair and a scarred mouth. She ignores Luce for a few minutes, finishing her routine, and when she turns to finally acknowledge her she does it with sword still in hand.

  “What do you need?”

  “I need my room back,” says Luce.

            Lauré shakes her head a little, sheathes her sword. “No, you don’t.”

   “Yeah, I do,” says Luce, and she means it. Lebo is easy and Ashé is strange and Luce has known them for just three days and already the shape of things is changing. Luce doesn’t have many of the things that the ink twins have had. She had the priests and the damtower and her room, and three days in is enough to see the shifting of it all.

            Lauré eyes her sidelong for a long moment, and then walks a little closer. She cuts a striking figure, at once imposing and underwhelming, tall and broad but not quite _looming_. It’s her eyes that give her away. Underneath the appearance of averageness she’s a viper, and none of the priests seem to have noticed. “And why did you come to me, if you really mean that? I’m new here. I don’t have the power to do that.”

  “I – don’t know,” says Luce. It is a lie, though she hadn’t realised it on the way here. Lauré doesn’t have the power to make Lebo and Ashé change rooms.

            But Lauré is _dangerous_.

  “You’ll have to be clear with me,” says Lauré. “Say what you mean.”

  “How did you know my name?”

  “It was written on the door,” says Lauré. “I needed someone to leave them with, and yours was the first door I tried.”

            Luce swallows, drops her eyes to the floor. The disappointment tastes sour in her mouth, and she doesn’t quite know what to do with that. What is she even disappointed about?  

            A hand claps down onto her shoulder, hesitant for perhaps half a second and then curling into a firm grip. She jerks her head up to find Lauré staring straight at her, direct and upfront and in command. “I thought it was a happy accident,” says Lauré. “It looked like it was working out. So what are you doing coming to me asking to get them moved?”

  “How can you judge what’s working when you don’t even know me,” says Luce.

  “You don’t know me either, but you’ve come looking for my opinion anyway,” says Lauré. “I can shut my mouth if you really want, but I don’t think that’s what you came here for.”

  “He’s going to fit in better here than I ever have, and this is my _home_ ,” blurts Luce, ducking her head again. “And Ashé – she’s already made friends with some of the other kids. I saw them hanging out at breakfast yesterday.”

            Lauré squeezes her shoulder, and then lets go. “The boy – Lebo. Why do you think he’s going to fit in so well? Tell me,” she commands, when Luce pulls a face and continues to stare down at her feet.

  “He’s a _natural_ ,” says Luce, because everyone else is saying it. She wrinkles her nose. “He likes the books. He loves the books! And he’s polite, and he works hard, and they’re already going to put him in practical spellwork classes. And I’m – I’m not good at any of that,” she says, swallowing tightly.  

  “Not many are,” says Lauré, and Luce hisses out a frustrated breath and makes to walk away. “I’m not good at any of those things either.”

  “That’s different!”

  “I don’t think it is,” says Lauré. “The priests – they love you, but at their hearts they are mages, so they are good at raising mages, and if you aren’t a mage? I don’t think they quite know what to do with you.”

            Luce is shaking her head even before she’s finished talking. “It’s not their fault.”

  “I’m not saying it is,” says Lauré, with gentleness that Luce hadn’t imagined her being capable of. “But a null raised among mages? It’s as if you’re marking yourself by your ability to breathe water.”

  “So what do I do?” asks Luce, turning to look up into Lauré’s face. “You said it. They’re all mages. There’s nothing they can teach me that I’ll be good at.”

            This time it’s Lauré who looks away, down to where she’s running her thumb over the pommel of her sword. “Well, they’re not the only ones in the tower anymore. And I guess us nulls probably have a few things we could teach to one another.” She lifts her head and flashes Luce a sharp look. “I’m not saying I can make you feel like you fit in. But I know plenty of things that the priests don’t, and if you want to learn any of them, I’d be happy to teach you.”

  “Why?” asks Luce. “You don’t know me.”

  “I’m new here. I don’t know anyone,” says Lauré, and there is something aching and awful in her face for a moment before she blanks it away. “Just think about it, all right? You’re a good kid, and I’m excellent at what I do.”

            There’s no joke in her _excellent_ , only straight honesty. “What do you do?” asks Luce, and with that question her biting anxiety subsides a little. She looks Lauré up and down, crooked nose and scarred mouth and the stance of her so comfortable even with the sword on her hip. This woman, this near-stranger, looks more like someone Luce could be than any of the priests that have known her over the long years.

  “I’m a guard,” says Lauré. She pulls her sword free of its sheathe in one sleek motion, and the unwavering steadiness of her hand around its weight draws Luce’s eye like nothing else ever has.

  “Sounds like fun,” says Luce, and smiles.

* * *

            It’s not fun, and it won’t be until years have passed and Luce has grown the build to handle an actual blade, but it’s something. It’s sweat and hard work and the burn of exhaustion beneath her skin. She wakes earlier than she used to, eats breakfast quickly and alone and then ascends to the open air at the top of the damtower. Luce always meets her there, nods to her in greeting, and then they start. Stretches and then the dance of the footwork, Lauré’s sword controlled with staggering and absolute care as she meets Luce’s wilder swings.

            The durn kid that Lauré brought with her is always there, watching from ten or so paces away. They’re a couple years younger than Luce, all scowls and sullen silence. It’s difficult to take seriously when they stand up and the top of their head is below Luce’s shoulder.

  “Hey, Tia,” says Luce, one morning near the beginning, and the kid huffs.

            She says it every day, and slowly the huff turns into a nod and then into a very quiet hello. Six months later and Luce has still to see them say more than three words in one go, but she knows it’s more than most get to see, so she’s grateful anyway.

            Luce has never lost anyone. Her parents have been a lifelong absence, and she knows her homeland through pictures. She doesn’t even know if Akorrus really is her homeland – she looks Akorrusian, but that means little in a world with venulars and great oceanic sailing ships. Would it still be her homeland if the last people in her bloodline to set foot there were her great-grandparents? The letter she was sent with said she was born in Akorrus, but letters can be wrong and Miringnell is a long way from the Akorrusian border. If she really was born in Akorrus, then it would have been easier to send her to literally anywhere else in Winafore other than Miringnell. Thinking about it is – hard, so she dreams instead about the smothering heat of forests and jewel-bright birds the size of a fingernail, and never looks at the letter she keeps in a box beneath her bed.

            Luce has never lost anyone. Hers is a life with gaps in it, yes, but she was born with those gaps. She was never there for the losing. She was never a witness.

            Tia and Lauré have been witnesses. It’s in their eyes, in Tia’s quietness, in the way Lauré will stare north sometimes in between sentences, her hand gripping her sword tight enough to leave an imprint on her palm. Somehow, somewhere, they lost parts of themselves.

            This is how Lauré lives with it – she teaches Luce up on the roof of the damtower with the sky so huge around them it’s as if they could step wrong and fall into it. Luce never asks, and she never says, and at the end of the day she goes back to her room and back to the ink twins and waits for the next morning to come.

* * *

            They call it the War of Grief. Its official beginning is six months after the attack on the North Star and her family, and for all grief is a consuming and awful thing the war starts at a crawl. Winafore and Tristérn have squabbled over their border for all the many centuries of their history, and the countless years have left both sides firmly entrenched. Piling in enough resources for the Winaforian side to gain any traction takes time, and in a country used to supplying these kinds of efforts it takes even longer for the effects to reach isolated little towns like Miringnell.

            It starts with an increased workload a year after the War begins. Venulars begin to arrive on long trips from towns close to the border, and they come with letters and soldiers. The farmers that tend fields outside the town walls are told to work harder. The woodcutters must haul more timber. The bakers wake earlier and make less bread and more biscuits and crackers. The letters demand it and the soldiers enforce the letters, and so it goes, the demand increasing over the years until they are all feeling the pressure.

            Beyond the walls, the broadleaf forests have shrunk back to the horizon. The animals are frightened and harder to find. The skies are dotted with a never-ending line of venulars coming to take more and more with every trip.

            Inside the walls, faces are grim and pinched with stress. The honey and the jam and the butter have gone from the regular breakfasts of the priests at the tower. Instead they go to the bakeries at dawn to collect whatever has been hidden aside for them, and sometimes it is bread like it used to be but more often it is those awful biscuits that the entire War effort seems to sustain itself on.

            Eight years from the start of the War and Luce spends most of her early hours on this trip. She’s fourteen and already well on the way to six feet, her body now well accustomed to the feel and weight of a sword. She’s tall and broad and is up in the mornings anyway for her training with Lauré, so she volunteers for the duty. She’s glad for it, because it’s how she meets Das.

            Das is eighteen, and Luce sees her almost every morning because Das lives and works at Miringnell’s smallest bakery. It’s tiny, just Das and her father Ruan, the two of them starting work well before dawn every single day of the year. Das is all round eyes and overlarge glasses and sweet smiles.

            Das’ other father, Laor, is Akorrusian. There’s a picture of them all together on the wall of the bakery, to the right of the counter. Das is small in it, chubby and smiley as she still is in the present. Ruan is a looming redheaded presence, the line of his jaw obscured by his beard. Laor—

            Laor is golden brown skin and dark hair he wears coiled up into an elaborate bun. His smile is slight but his eyes are warm, and the lobes of his ears glitter with dangling piercings. His bottom lip is marked by a dab of paint in the middle, artfully placed. His clothes are Winafore greens and yellows but sleeker and missing the ridiculous furs.

            He has been dead for five years. It is a strange feeling, mourning a stranger. Luce stares at the picture as often as she can, greedily taking in every detail. She knows many things about Akorrus, but to see them together on a person – a _real_ person – is something else entirely.

  “Are you okay?” asks Das one time, when Luce stares at the picture just a whisker too long. “You just – you look at that every time you come in.”

            Luce, wide-eyed, cycles through a dozen different explanations. The seconds tick by with agonising slowness. Finally, driven by the crawl of embarrassment over her skin, she speaks. “I don’t know who my parents are,” she says, and the honesty is even worse than the silence.

  “I can tell you about him, if you want,” offers Das, and she somehow _gets_ it, and that’s where they begin.

            Das is as kind as it’s possible to be with the War coming down harder on them with every passing year. She’s kind and sweet and does her best to keep the priests fed even as the soldiers demand more and more of what she and her father make. Luce likes her. She’s different to the brusqueness of Lauré, to surly Tia, to bookish Lebo and lively, mercurial Ashé. She’s – steady.

            It’s easy to see why Lebo falls in love with her. It’s so easy that Luce sees it coming from a mile off – he comes with her one morning to help carry back the bread and the biscuits and that’s it. They have no idea, of course, they just look at each other and then away and then back again, but Luce knows. It’s not love, not yet, but it could be.

            That’s more than enough reason for Luce to look for Ashé the minute she’s done with her training. She’s still sweaty, but she keeps thinking of Lebo and Das, their startled little smiles, the nervous meeting of their eyes.

  “You’re, uh,” says Ashé, when Luce finds her. She’s in her usual spot on a hill outside of the town, leaning back on the grass with her face tipped up to the half-hearted northern sun. It’s cold out here and empty except for the sad stumps of felled trees, but Ashé comes here a lot.

  “Sweaty, yeah. I ran. Up a hill,” says Luce, waving her hand back down the slope towards the town.

  “It’s not that big of a hill,” says Ashé, and fair enough because Luce is _drenched_ in sweat. Her shirt is dark with it, sticking to her stomach and back. Up here the wind whips across them without a treeline to slow it, and Luce shivers enough that Ashé gets up and passes over her cloak, tucking it tight around Luce’s shoulders and arms before settling down again.

  “I think Lebo and Das should date,” blurts Luce, and Ashé’s eyebrows shoot upwards. She’s quiet for a long moment, before her brows sink to a more normal position.

            She nods. “Yeah. I know.”

  “Why aren’t they—?”

  “They’re as bad as each other, you know? Lebo is – _Lebo_ , and Das is the same. Neither of them’s gonna say anything.”

  “But why haven’t _you_ said anything?” asks Luce. “Lebo listens to you.”

Ashé shrugs. It’s her all over, impulsive and hesitant at the same time. Luce has never understood how the quiet, tentative side of her continues to rear its head, especially when on the surface she’s always been loud and confident.

  “I – well, I don’t want to push anything,” Ashé says, eventually.

  “Sometimes people need a push.”

  “I don’t want to break anything by pushing too hard.”

  “There’s nothing to push!” says Luce, frustrated. “It’s okay to give people a nudge. It’s hardly going to hurt anyone.”

            Ashé shakes her head. “Sometimes it does hurt.”

  “I trust you to know when and when not to push,” says Luce, and Ashé bites at her lip, shakes her head again. “ _Ashé._ What’s wrong?”

            Ashé opens her mouth, closes it. She’s quiet, still, both of these things so unlike her that Luce stares at her without blinking. Up here on the hillside she looks at home, her cheeks pinked by the bite of the wind, her freckles bright as blood. Her hair is lit orange around the edges, its untidy kinks and waves startlingly angular around the roundness of her face. Usually she is a livewire, her body alive with restless energy. Here she is calm.

            It’s a strange look on her, but maybe one Luce could stand to see a little more of.

  “Ashé,” Luce says again, into the quiet.

Ashé draws up her knees and wraps her arms around them. She props her chin on her crossed wrists. “I just don’t want to ruin anything,” she says, soft.

  “There’s nothing to ruin,” says Luce. “Not yet, anyway.”

            Ashé doesn’t say anything to that, and Luce knows Ashé too well to pressure her more. She was right, after all – some things _do_ break when pushed too hard, and Ashé is one of them. Luce isn’t sure if Ashé has been pushed to that point before, but there’s something about her that makes Luce back off when they get into conversations like this. Something sharp, something vulnerable.

            Luce wonders who will be the one to finally push Ashé that bit too far, and hopes that it won’t be her.

* * *

            It’s nine years since the beginning of the War. Luce is fifteen. She is six feet tall and broad at the shoulders, and her hands show the marks of her training in the form of calluses and old nicks. She still trains every morning, but nowadays it’s less learning and more hands-on. Stretches lead to a warm-up lead to open spar, and crossing swords with Lauré makes Luce feel alive like nothing else she’s ever known.

            Tia still watches, their attention keen even as their hands practise the alphabet of shapes needed for spellwork. They still don’t talk much, not to Luce or Lauré or anyone, but they don’t need to for their skill to be apparent. They’re thirteen and small for it, tiny hands and tiny feet and a tiny scowling face. They are also an incredibly powerful spellwright, enough so that the priests barely know what to do with them. Most spellwrights focus on just one or two areas, but Tia works all of them with seemingly equal ability. The northern air is cold and thick with moisture, though, so it does make water and ice work easiest.

            Luce wonders what it’s like, to wield that sort of power. To look at a passer-by on the street and be aware of how easily you could kill them. It seems both less and more intimate than a sword, somehow. It makes Luce uneasy, that kind of power. Maybe if she had any ability at it she would understand it better, be more comfortable with it, but she’s as null as they come, so that’s never going to happen. Luce is fine with that. She has her sword and her hard-won muscle and that’s enough.

            It’s been nine years since the beginning of the War, and conscription finally began six months ago. It hasn’t reached them yet but it’s widespread across the south. The official posters state that their newly swollen armies will crush the Tristérnians, but Luce sees these alongside letters from relatives – sad, desperate little scraps of paper passed furtively by the braver soldiers that come to town. The letters come from all the great cities of the south – from Sholltondiela, from Coll, from Shaenle – but they’re all the same. _Live in the forests_ , they plead. _Leave Winafore_. _Don’t let them take you_.

            Some do leave. Entire extended families disappear from Miringnell overnight to try their luck in the vast emptiness of the frozen forests just a little further north. But the priests remain, and so do the ink twins, and so does Luce.

            A few weeks later, and it’s seven months since the beginning of conscription. A smaller venular arrives with the others, and this one spits out a dozen soldiers and a single long scroll of paper. The soldiers march it through town under the wary gaze of hundreds of eyes. They take it to the Rynns, and the next morning the street outside their house reeks of ink and there is a letter waiting for every family in town.

            The queue is long and deathly silent. Luce stares down at it from her window, tracing where it snakes past the damtower all the way down the street to the Rynns’ front door. There are people coming the other way, some fast and others drifting in little clumps. Luce sees people crying, some on their knees on the cobblestones.

            Not everyone is upset. She sees a woman with her head held high and proud, and it stirs something in her that she didn’t know existed. She sinks back onto her bed, letting the curtains fall shut in front of her. A narrow beam of light cuts across the sheet and up her belly and chest. She stares down at it for a few moments before shuffling out of its way.

            There’s a noise at her door, and she turns to see Lebo standing there. The light from the curtains splits his face in two, slashing across his mouth like Lauré’s scar.

  “I’m not on the list,” he tells her. “It worked.”

            He looks shocked, shaky. He goes slowly to his bed and folds down onto it. He sits with his head bowed and his hands joined over his knees.

  “We knew it would,” says Luce.

  “It didn’t feel real,” Lebo replies. “But it _is_. I’m safe. I’m safe!”

            Luce smiles at him. He looks so much like Ashé in this moment, animated like her where he is usually so quiet. He has the same hair, the same eyes, the same big nose. “I’m glad,” she says, and he flashes her a look of such happiness that she can’t help but smile in return.

  “I don’t have to leave,” he says. He jumps to his feet, paces their room in long-legged strides. “I can stay. I can – Song Gods, I can do _anything!_ ”

  “As if you’d ever leave your books,” scoffs Luce, affectionate.

  “But now I have the _option_ ,” says Lebo. “I mean, you’re right, I’m going to be a priest and I’m going to have so many books that we’ll knock them over in the mornings, but – I have the choice! I’ve never had a choice before,” he adds, eyes rounding with surprise.

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “No, it is. Before the War I was going to keep up the printshop, and then I started training as a priest, but now – I could change things, if I wanted to.” He shakes his head, sits back down on his bed.

  “But you won’t.”

  “What?”

  “You won’t change anything,” says Luce. She thinks of that woman with her head held high and proud. “You’re happy with things they way they are.”

            He nods, and Luce swallows and looks away, because she’s _not_ happy and she doesn’t know why. She was fine yesterday.

            Then she forgets about herself for a while, because it turns out that while Lebo is safe and so is Ashé, their parents are fair game.

* * *

  “They never said,” says Ashé, her voice thin with stress. “They never said a Gods-be-damned _word._ ”

  “Ashé—” tries Lebo, but he’s too gentle to quiet Ashé when she’s like this, and she just flaps a hand at him and makes a shrill noise of frustration.

  “When?” asks Luce, because she knows better than to be gentle.

            Ashé stops, all of her going tight and still. “Detha in a week. Nadem when I turn sixteen.”

            There is no world where a week will ever be enough to say goodbye, but they try anyway. Luce is there for bits and pieces of it, and it’s awful. Lebo is quiet, Cyrilln too, and Aldira and Ashé talk around each other the whole time, never quite making contact with one another. It’s awful.

            The thing is, Luce has known this would happen. She’s been waiting for it for years. She knew that there was something going unsaid amidst all the worry about protecting Lebo. She knew, and she was waiting for it, and it’s still the most awful thing in the world.

            A week is a fucking _joke_.

* * *

            It is easily the largest venular Luce has ever seen, with two decks and a skyharness big enough to hold a house. The latch points for the harness are thick hoops of metal big enough to climb through. The hull is a vast curve of wood, unpainted and etched with earth runes for strength and protection.

            Next to it, Aldira looks very small. She is forty-five now but she looks older, and the perpetually worried expression that she was known for in the years before the War has crumpled into something almost painful to look at. Her shoulders are slumped beneath the weight of the pack she carries, and by something worse.

            There is a terrible weariness in her eyes when she steps onto the boarding ramp and looks back down it at them. It has been only a week since the conscription letters arrived, and a week is a hopelessly short time in which to say goodbye.

            She turns away and continues up the ramp, and then she is gone.

* * *

            Luce has never been close to Aldira, but she feels her absence. It’s there in the sharp downwards curl of Ashé’s mouth, in the weeks Lebo spends lost in his books. They had been so happy when they found out that Lebo was safe. They had been so happy, and now they’re miserable and it’s as if Luce can’t bring herself to look away. It gets worse, and the weeks and the months creep by, and Luce is trapped watching them as they fall apart and turn away from one another. Ashé becomes snappish and sharp and Lebo walks around with his face hidden behind his books and Cyrilln…  

            Cyrilln stays at home, and he prints day and night, and he is diminished. He has always been a tall man, but he seems almost small in the wake of losing Aldira. His smiles are gone, and their absence leaves the house empty and cold, and somewhere along the way Luce becomes the one to intervene. She steps back from Ashé, from Lebo, and goes to their father instead.

            The first time, she finds him at work. To Luce, who has spent her entire life in the damtower, a house is a strange environment to be in. Theirs is three stories, narrow, built from sandy blocks unlike the cool bluish stone of the tower. Luce knocks on the door and it shifts under her touch, and she hesitates for only a moment before pushing it the rest of the way open. The reek of half-dried ink makes Luce’s eyes water when she steps inside. It’s so thick in the air it seems to compress the already tight hallway.

Luce has never been to the printing room, but she knows where it is. Even if she hadn’t known, it would have been easy to follow her nose. She heads up the first flight of stairs and hesitates on the landing. There are three doors here, and one of them is ajar. Stepping quietly, she peers through it.

The room is unlived in, not even a single sheet on the bed, just naked mattress. The walls are bare and pocked with nail marks. There are curtains, but their look a little musty and somehow Luce knows that they haven’t been disturbed in years.

This was Lebo’s room, once. He was a child here, before the war. Now it’s a place of mourning for what could have been, and Luce can finally see why Ashé followed Lebo into the tower.

She steps out and closes the door firmly behind her, and then takes the next flight of stairs. The next and final landing is narrower, and the stench of ink has grown to be almost unbearable. Luce’s throat itches, and her eyes water. She blinks hard through the discomfort and keeps going, right up to the only door on this floor. It’s ajar, and the handle is tacky when she touches it. She nearly pushes it open, then hesitates and gently knocks.

There is no reply, and when she leans close to the door she can’t hear anything inside. But the front door was unlocked, and Miringnell is small but not enough so that it’s safe to walk around with your doors swinging open at the brush of a finger. Luce remembers coming to the print shop before, ringing the bell by the front door. Cyrilln would be the one to answer, and he’d have all the letters and prints laid out in the kitchen in shallow boxes that covered most of the counter space and parts of the floor. Aldira was more rarely seen, most often upstairs in the printing room or carting stacks of dried sheets down to the kitchen for organising.

Luce knocks again, and there’s still no reply. She puts her hand back on the door and gives it a gentle push, popping her head through the gap.

The print room is the biggest space in the house, with exposed beams slung beneath the slanting ceiling and two large windows, one to the front of the house and one to the back. It’s cold up here, almost as cold as the outside, and Luce shivers. The chill is thanks to the windows, one of which is thrown wide open to let out the fumes, though going by the smell of the rest of the house it doesn’t seem to be working too well.

The beams support a web of strings, which hang heavy under the weight of countless drying prints. Some of them are the more modern photographic prints, but most are plain text. They twist and flutter under the push of the air through the open window, but they’re hung far enough apart that they make a surprisingly quiet sound.

There’s a point of stillness in the room, and it’s in the form of a tall man slumped across an enormous desk. His wide shoulders are pinched together with tension, and when Luce steps towards him she sees that even in sleep his expression is one of deep stress and unhappiness.

  “ _Dren_ Cyrilln,” she says, coming closer. “Excuse me? Dren?”

            He mumbles but otherwise doesn’t stir. She waits for a long moment, and then gingerly reaches forwards and pats him on the shoulder. His reaction is explosive – every long limb flies out of its crumpled posture, and she jumps backwards to avoid getting socked in the face. He spins around and has to slap his hand down on the desk to avoid toppling his chair. His hair is flattened on one side from where his face was pressed into the desk. She bites the inside of her mouth to stop herself from laughing.

  “Luce,” he says, visibly relaxing as he recognises her. “I’m – I don’t usually sleep on the job.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” says Luce. They stare at each other for a moment, both of them a bit unsure as to what to do next. Luce barely even understands why she’s here with Cyrilln rather than his children – rather than her _friends_.

            She’s glad she is here, though. His eyes are deeply shadowed, his cheeks pinched in. He still carries that awful tension between his shoulders. She suspects that under the ink he probably smells pretty unpleasant. Compare that to his children, both of whom are changed but still caring for themselves, and he is obviously struggling. It’s not to say that Lebo and Ashé aren’t struggling, but they have ways of coping that are separate to their family. Lebo has his spells and books, and Ashé has Lebo.

            Cyrilln has a room that used to be his wife’s and an empty house.

  “What are you working on?” she asks, even though with her height she can already see over his shoulder down to his desk. There are forms there, full of blank lines and bullet points.

  “Oh, just – things for the War,” he says. He looks around at his desk, and his eyes rest uneasily on those forms before moving on to the piles of letters he’s been tasked with censoring before delivery. There’s a photograph tacked up on the wall above the desk, a big one in the best quality Luce has ever seen. It’s of the family, all four of them in the same frame. They all look oddly stiff in the way of most of the photographs Luce has seen, and their smiles are flat little lines, but it’s still weirdly miraculous to see the four of them together like that when in real life they are now so divided. It was taken perhaps two years ago, when Lebo was eighteen and still all elbows and knees and truly pathetic facial hair. Ashé looks much the same as she always has, like Lebo in feminine miniature, though she’s happier in the photograph than she is now. Considering she’s hardly pulling an expression at all in the picture, that’s saying something.

  “Have you heard anything?” Luce asks, catching his eyes as he looks back round towards her. “Is she settling in all right?”

  “As well as she can,” he says, and the smile he pulls for her is a pained and ugly thing.

  “She’s not in the fighting,” says Luce. “She’ll be fine.”

            Aldira is a masterful spellwright with a specialism in water runes, giving her a great advantage when it comes to print work. Cyrilln has become great too in the long years of their marriage, but Aldira is the mastermind behind the printshop’s success. They’re good enough that they’ve held all communications contracts for Miringnell for fifteen years now – good enough to sell their skills and contacts to secure their son a place with the priests at the first sign of the coming War.

            Good enough for the soldiers crewing the venulars that come to Miringnell so often to notice her. Good enough for the priests to be unable to hide her when the soldiers came asking after her.

            Except the priests had never intended to hide her, and Aldira hadn’t asked for it either. Luce sees that. Ashé and Lebo don’t. They are angry and disappointed and hurt, and now their father is alone in the aftermath.

            There was nothing that could have hidden Aldira and Cyrilln from the War’s greedy eyes. Luce understands this, as did Lauré when she mentioned it to her. Aldira and Cyrilln knew it too. Aldira went to her fate without tears, and for all his pain Cyrilln is still hard at work where others would be inconsolable.

            Aldira has been gone for six weeks, and Luce is tired of Ashé and Lebo’s misdirected anger.

  “You’ve got a year and a half,” she says, and Cyrilln blinks up at her with eyes muddled by exhaustion. “Until you leave,” she clarifies, and he bobs his head in a weary nod.  

            Another silence. The papers overhead twist slowly as a gentle front of wind comes curling in through the window.

            Inexplicably, Luce flashes to all those dreams of crushingly hot forests, to faceless parents and the name she never knew. She looks at this person in front of her, this real father who loves his children and now lives alone in the house where they were born. She doesn’t know what expression she’s making, but the weariness shrinks back from Cyrilln’s eyes, and he pushes up to his feet, where he wavers as if thinking of hugging her.

            He doesn’t, though his hands hover awkwardly between them. It’s strange, because Luce has always been a tactile person and she’s been close friends with his children for nearly a decade. She looks into his eyes and sees that he’s wary of her. It’s new and a little unsettling, and she glances down at herself – six feet of muscle and years of training have done a lot to change the scrawny little durn child that Cyrilln had once known.

            She takes one of those hovering hands, squeezes it, and then lets go. He smiles at her, a little watery.

            She won’t let this family rot from the inside.

* * *

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I don’t care what you want,” says Luce, and she’s sharp because this is Ashé, and she can take it. “Your nadem needs you!”

            Ashé shakes her head, and Luce grabs her shoulder. Ashé shrugs her off and shifts away, flashing her a scowl surly enough to be a match for Tia at their worst.

            They’re in Luce and Lebo’s room, and Luce is already regretting the choice. It’s not that she’d meant to barrel straight into the point of it, but seeing Cyrilln so – _different_ made Luce blunter than usual. Now, with their voices leaping in volume with each thing they say, the room feels even smaller than usual, and the safeness of the space feels uncertain for the first time in Luce’s life.

  “He’s fine,” says Ashé, and Luce grabs for her again. “Don’t touch me!”

  “How would you know? You haven’t seen him!”

  “He’s fine!”

  “He’s not fine,” says Luce. She stops herself, takes a deep, shuddery breath. “Gods, Ashé. I’m not trying to fight you!”

            Ashé lifts her head and looks resolutely away.

  “He needs his family,” says Luce. “He just lost his _wife_ , Ashé. Don’t make him lose his children as well.”

  “He’s already lost us.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” snaps Luce, and Ashé looks round at her in alarm. “Yeah, I mean that. He’s less than a mile from you. He’s only lost you if you listen to all this and then don’t go to him.

            Ashé stares at Luce, her eyes wide and dark. She nods, but her expression is a strange one. “Are you going to grill Lebo like this?” she asks, her tone curiously flat. “Or is it just me?”

  “He’ll have his turn, don’t you worry,” says Luce, but Ashé still seems unsettled enough that she decides to move to easier topics of conversation.

            Lebo is both easier and more difficult. He’s softer than Ashé, so he can’t take the same kind of sharpness. He’ll be more easily hurt, either by Luce talking to him or by the knowledge of his nadem’s isolation. He’s going to get hurt no matter what Luce does, so she’s a bit stymied about her approach.

            She finds him in Das’ bakery, in the back room with flour dusted in his stupid gingery beard and smeared over his forearms. He blinks up at her as she enters, and he looks so happy and so at peace that she hesitates in the entryway. Behind her there’s a tinkle of bells as someone else enters the café. She could say she’s here to pick up a surprise for Lauré and Tia. It’s tempting.

            Das pushes past Luce to say hello to the other visitor, leaving Luce and Lebo alone. He smiles at her and slaps his hands against his borrowed apron to try and get off the flour, but he just ends up with big hand prints all over his lap.

  “Baking?”

  “Das and Ruan needed a little help,” he says. “It’s good work.”

            It’s strange to see him all dirtied up like this. Lebo’s work is all books and cramped handwriting and spellcasting. Here in the bakery’s workroom he’s flushed with heat and his hair is scraped back into a much tighter tail than usual, and he has flour everywhere. It’s nice, to see him this way. Strange, but nice.

  “I’m sure you had the time to spare,” says Luce, and Luce flushes even redder and ducks his head. They both know he’s usually swamped under his constant research and all the many things he does to look after the little ones in the damtower. The fact that he’s made time to be here, to help Das, well. It’s quite something.

  “Speaking of time to spare,” says Luce, her thoughts drifting back to Cyrilln alone in the printing room while his wife is hard at work in a war zone. “Have you talked to Cyrilln lately?”

            He hasn’t, she knows, and it’s unusual for him. For all he hasn’t lived at home since the War began, he’s always made the effort to try and make his parents still feel like parents. He visits almost every day, tells them about his work and his studies, eats lunch with them. He’s a good son, and a good boy in general. A good man, even. He is twenty now, after all. He’s not the boy that Luce first met.

  “I – no,” he says, and he twists his hands together, eyes darting away from her own.

  “I think maybe you should visit,” says Luce, as gently as she can.

  “Is he all right?” he asks, looking directly at her, worry sharp in his expression. “I mean, he’s not, because – but is he?”

  “I think you should visit him,” Luce repeats, and his head drops a little and his shoulders slump. He looks like his nadem. He looks exhausted.

            But he agrees, and that’s all she needed.

* * *

            Luce isn’t there for whatever conversations take place, but she sleeps alone in her room that night for the first time in nine years. She sits on her bed with her curtains open. The silvered outlines of familiar things aren’t settling her the way they usually would.

            Lebo’s empty bed is huge in the side of her vision. On the floor, the blankets where Ashé somehow manages to sleep are cold and still. She thinks of them asleep in their real home, and bites at the inside of her cheek when she remembers Lebo’s empty shell of a room.

            She turns her head away from the rest of the room and looks out through the window. It’s late enough that most of the houses are dark, though the town wall still glows with passive runespells. Beyond the wall is a patchwork of fields, and beyond them are unending forests all the way to the sea. Above all of it the skies are cavernous and brilliant with stars.

            Luce doesn’t remember much of her life here before the ink twins. She was six when she met them properly, and what do you really remember of being six, let alone anything earlier. It’s less that she remembers and more that occasionally she will notice that something doesn’t seem quite right, and she will wonder if that’s a result of a hidden memory but there’s no way to be sure.

            The emptiness of the sky has always felt wrong to Luce. It’s one of the markers of being in the isolated Winforian north, the big skies with its clouds that come in dark grey wedges or not at all, but it makes her uneasy. When she looks up at that big sky she’s never looking at the whole of it the way that Ashé does on the hillside she always goes to. Luce is always looking for something up in the emptiness, a silhouette she knows in her bones.

            Luce will never see what she’s looking for, because there hasn’t been a dragon seen in Winafore for nine long years. Luce doesn’t quite know why she’s thinking of them, alone in her room at night. She stares at the sky and she thinks of dragons and she thinks of the War.

            She wonders what it feels like to leave.

* * *

            All of her weight pitches onto her back foot. Her wrist aches smartly from the force of the blow she blocks. There’s a second where she thinks she’s got it, that she can push back, but then she reassesses and chooses a different tactic. So she puts all of her weight onto her back foot and pivots, letting the sword she was locked with slide past her.

            It turns fast to follow her and she ducks and kicks the owner in the back of the knee, and stays in an awkward half-crouch as they crash to the ground.

            Luce is sixteen, and this is first time she’s beaten Lauré in an open spar. She isn’t sure who’s more shocked. Lauré stays still on the ground for long breaths while Luce stares down at her in bewilderment, and then rolls onto her back and huffs out a laugh.

  “That was _excellent_ ,” she says, lifting her sword to point at Luce. She drops her arm back down the ground a moment later, dropping her head back against the cool stone of the damtower roof. “Wow. _Wow._ ”

  “Thanks,” says Luce. Modesty isn’t something Lauré appreciates.

            Lauré gets back to her feet. She sheathes her sword, and then swings her arm out and gives Luce a hearty pat on the shoulder. “Nice work,” she says, and she’s smiling wider than Luce has ever seen.

            She’s smiling. She’s happy. Luce doesn’t know much of Lauré’s life before she came to Miringnell, but she’s _happy_. She has survived the grief that has defined her early weeks and months here, and she is happy.

            Luce wonders if the dragons are happy, wherever they are. She thinks again about what it means to leave, and makes a decision.

* * *

            Cyrilln leaves, and it is awful.

* * *

            She knows she doesn’t seem like much of a writer. She’s all height and broad shoulders and big, callused hands. But Luce was raised by priests, in a tower with an entire floor dedicated to books. When you’re confused about your identity in a tower full of books and don’t have any friends, you do a lot of reading.

            Her handwriting isn’t the best, but her grammar is perfect. Luce is not the kind of person to be mediocre at anything.

            It helps her now, as she sits and writes the most important letter of her life. When she’s done she’s written only a few paragraphs. It doesn’t seem enough. This piece of paper will change everything. It seems too small for the impact it will have.

            She folds it in half and seals it in an envelope. On the back she writes her address and name, and that’s it. It’s so light, just a bit of paper with some ink on it, but it feels like a stone in her pocket when she takes it to where it needs to go. She leaves the town walls and goes to the venular port – nothing more than a field, really, but Luce has read that in the cities the ports have water instead of grass, and that in the capital the docks are made from marble. She doubts that, but it’s a nice image.

            The largest venular in the port belongs to the War effort. Most of them belong to the War, actually, but the rest of them are a small courier ships and passenger ships for those returning wounded. This one is a proper warship, with a reinforced hull and a ram on the prow. The sky harness shimmers with protective spellwork, warding it against fire or blade. She’s seen this kind of venular before – once for Aldira, and again for Cyrilln, who has been gone for only a couple of months. The soldiers milling around it wear mostly leathers with a little metal across the torso. Their armour is probably spell-stitched and tougher than it looks. It’s how Lauré’s armour works, though hers are deep orange and bronze where these are plain tan and grey.

  “Excuse me,” says Luce, to one who passes close by – a durn soldier with the hoop braid designating their durn identity tucked back with the rest of their hair into a low tail. “Could you take this?”

They make no attempt to take it. “What is it?”

  “I – want to be a soldier,” says Luce. “This is—”

  “We don’t need a letter,” the soldier says. “What’s your name?”

  “Luce.”

  “Be here a week tomorrow, in the morning. That’s when we leave.”

  “You don’t need anything – nothing in writing?”

            The soldier gives her a strange look and walks off. Luce stares after them, the letter still in her hand. She looks down at it, runs her thumb over her own name, and then puts it back into her pocket.

            Letter, words, whatever. It’s done. Luce is going to join the War.

           

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> To read the rest of the webcomic, go to the-void-walkers.tumblr.com! :)


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